What to Ask a Beekeeper Before You Buy

People are shy about asking. You’re standing at a table talking to someone who looks like they know what they’re doing, and it feels rude to quiz them about their own honey. It isn’t rude. Every beekeeper I know would rather be asked. Here are the questions to ask when buying local honey, my answers to all six, and two more I don’t answer on a website.

1. Are you the beekeeper?

This comes first because everything else depends on it.

The honey trade has beekeepers and it has packers, and both are legitimate. A packer buys honey in volume, sometimes from a lot of beekeepers, sometimes from a lot of countries, and puts it in jars. A beekeeper has hives.

A packer at a market table isn’t doing anything wrong. But they can’t tell you where the bees were, what they were foraging on, or what happened at extraction, because they weren’t there.

Mine: we keep the bees. About 500 hives around the Treasure Valley. The honey in the jar came off those hives and nowhere else.

2. Where are the hives?

Not the exact addresses. The area, and what kind of place.

A hive eats whatever grows where you put it down, and whatever the bees bring home ends up in your jar. So where the hive sits decides what the honey is, long before a frame comes off.

Expect a straight answer about the region. A lot of beekeepers keep the specific properties private, because those are someone else’s farms and someone else’s business. That’s fair. A seller who won’t name even the county is a different thing.

Mine: every hive sits on an organic farm around the valley, by agreement with the farmer who works it. None in a backyard, none parked wherever there was room. I don’t name the farms, and that’s on purpose. Why the farms matter is in Why Our Hives Sit on Organic Farms.

3. What happens between the hive and the jar?

This one separates people who did the work from people who repeat a word.

Don’t ask “is it raw,” because everyone says yes and the word means nothing in law in the United States. Ask what the actual steps are. Someone who strains and jars can tell you in one sentence. Someone who can’t answer is describing a process they didn’t do.

Mine: it comes off the hive, it goes through one large strainer to catch bees and bits of comb, and it goes into a mason jar. Nothing finer than that strainer happens to it.

The difference between straining and filtering is the one thing most worth understanding here. It’s laid out in Raw, Unfiltered, Never Heated.

4. Has it been heated?

Warming honey makes it thin, and thin honey pours, strains and bottles fast. That’s why nearly all commercial honey gets warmed at some point.

Heat costs you the smell first and the enzymes after. It’s also what makes fine filtering possible, since cold honey won’t go through a fine filter at any useful rate. So heating and filtering tend to go together.

Ask it as a temperature question, not a yes or no. “Do you warm it at all, and how much” gets a better answer than “is it unheated.”

Mine: never. No heat at any stage.

5. Is anything added to it?

The blunt version of this question is whether it’s honey at all.

That isn’t paranoia. The European Commission ran a coordinated check on honey coming into EU borders between November 2021 and February 2022. Of 320 samples its Joint Research Center analyzed, 46 percent were strongly suspected of being cut with sugar syrup. Five years earlier the rate was 14 percent.

Separately, in 2011 Food Safety News had American supermarket honey tested and found more than three quarters of it had been ultrafiltered until no pollen could be detected. That’s a different problem. It’s real honey with its identity stripped out, so nobody, including a regulator, can check where it came from.

Neither of those is about the person at the table down the road. Both are the reason that person exists.

Mine: nothing is added. Strainer, jar, lid.

6. Are you registered?

This one depends on where you’re standing, and in Idaho it’s easy to check.

Idaho requires any beekeeper running more than 50 colonies to register with the state Department of Agriculture. It isn’t a quality certification and it doesn’t mean the honey is good. It tells you the scale someone is actually operating at, and whether they’re inside the system or beside it.

Mine: at about 500 hives we’re a long way past that line.

Two questions I don’t answer here

A buyer’s guide that only asks questions the author can answer is a rigged test, so here are the two where I come up short.

How do you manage the hives, and do you treat them? It’s a fair question and a common one, and I haven’t written about hive management anywhere on this site. I’m not going to start now just to fill a list. Ask me at the tent and I’ll talk about it.

How much honey do you produce a year, and when do you pull it? Same answer. I haven’t said. Every number on this site is one I can stand behind, and that only means something if I hold to it when the missing number would have looked good.

I’d rather be short two answers than make two up.

Things to look at instead of ask

The jar tells you a few things on its own.

Foam on top. A thin layer is air worked in during bottling and it’s harmless. A thick layer can mean the honey was pulled before the bees finished capping it, which means more moisture in it than there should be.

Whether it eventually sets. Raw honey almost always crystallizes in the end. Honey that stays perfectly clear and liquid for a year has usually had the particles filtered out that crystals form on. That’s the most useful passive test there is, and it takes months, which is why nobody sells it as a test. More on it in When Honey Turns Solid.

Whether jars match. Color, thickness and taste moving between batches is a good sign. It means the honey follows the season. Supermarket honey is identical every time because it was blended from a lot of sources to be identical every time.

The label. Ours is a plain Ball or Kerr mason jar, sealed, with no label at all. The name is on the sign, not on the glass. I mention it because a pretty label tells you about a designer and not about a beekeeper.

What a good answer sounds like

It’s quick and specific, and it doesn’t reach for adjectives.

“About five hundred hives, all on organic farms around the valley, strained once and never heated” is an answer. “Our honey is pure, natural and locally sourced with all its beneficial properties intact” is a sentence someone wrote to be printed.

You aren’t testing anyone’s knowledge. You’re finding out whether the person in front of you did the thing they’re selling. People who did the thing talk about it in plain words.

One more. Ask what they won’t claim. Anyone who tells you their honey cures allergies is selling the most profitable sentence a local honey seller has, and the evidence doesn’t back it up. That’s a whole page of its own in Does Local Honey Help Allergies?.

Buying from me

Send an order through the site or text me. I confirm what’s on the shelf, we work out when and where you’re picking it up, and you pay by Venmo when you do.

A quart is $20 and a gallon is $60. There’s a five gallon too, and you’ll have to ask me the price on that one. I don’t ship, anywhere.

Ask me any of the six above before you buy. I’d rather answer them than have you take my word for it.